President Elects Remarks

by Elise Geltman, LCSW

Over the past few years, NCSPP leadership has been discussing the value and importance of building and sustaining community; thinking together; remaining rooted, playful, and creative; and staying alive. One of the ways we can do this is by seeing each other. While isolation and a mind of one's own are par for the course and fertile necessities in our field, we also need each other. Thank you to those of you who made it to the holiday party or an NCSPP course or event last year. To those of you who did not, we missed your presence and hope to see you and think together over the coming year.

In line with NCSPP's mission, each year we grant an award to an organization or individual whose work enlivens our community and helps ensure that high-quality psychoanalytic psychotherapy is available to diverse populations. For 2015, the Community Service Award was granted to The Psychotherapy Institute (TPI) in Berkeley. TPI was founded in 1971 by a group of female social workers with a mission to create an accessible, inclusive, socially responsible psychotherapy clinic and training institute. Forty-four years later, TPI remains committed to those missions and values, providing high-quality long-term psychotherapy on a sliding scale. TPI is also one of the few places in the Bay Area that provides psychodynamic training at the individual, group, and supervisory levels. TPI's president-elect, Marianne Gunther-Murphy, MFT, and board member Carol Zeitlin, MFT, accepted the award on behalf of the organization at the recent NCSPP holiday party.

The 2015 NCSPP Student Paper Award went to Jonathan Rousell, PsyD, a postdoc at UCSF, for his paper "Killing Time: Omnipotent Fantasies of Preservation, Hyper Compartmentalization, and the Denial of Death in the Digital Age." In this paper, Dr. Rousell explored how contemporary technologies have altered our sense of time and our psyches. Fort da board member Loong Kwok, PsyD, announced the award:

Jonathan takes us through the ways in which digital culture has changed our experience of time, and thusly our experience of reality. If entertainment is ever available, then what happens to our capacity to be bored?...He argues that we are killing time, negating its existence and influence... "Time," to quote Jonathan, "represents change, and on the heels of change comes the reality of loss." Jonathan's proposal that time is dead now requires us to examine how we understand what is important, what is worth doing, [and] what is worth preserving.

NCSPP and fort da are pleased to recognize and support this piece of scholarship.

Lastly, we would like to welcome the following incoming NCSPP leadership (in no particular order):

· Secretary, Kellen Grayson, LMFT, PsyD

· Outreach Membership Division Chair, Joseph Zamaria, PsyD

· Editor and fort da Chair, Peter Silen, PhD

· ISG Committee Co-Chair, Brenda Bloomfield, LCSW

· Education Committee Chair, Demetry Apostle, PhD

· Pre-licensed Committee Chair, Tanisha Stewart, MA

· Program Committee Chair, Garrett Howard, MFT

· Technology Committee Chair, Jason Brand, MFT

I am very much looking forward to the year ahead and to working with the assemblage of hearts and minds that create NCSPP and further psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the Bay Area.